FUKUOKA, Japan >>  An attendant helps him put on his coat and another deferentially holds open the door of a waiting van while the driver bows.

Attired in a suit and tie and clutching a bag, Fiamalu Penitani might be taken for a company president in Japan if not for his imposing 6-foot, 3-inch, 300-pound size and features widely recognized from a 14-year sumo career.

His is, as Penitani likes to say, “the business of sumo.”

And business has been good to the 44-year-old former Waianae High football player. 

After working his way up from performing on the hard-packed clay ring, where he won 12 Emperor’s Cups, symbolic of tournament championships, former yokozuna Musashimaru has moved into management. He’s become a stock-owning, stable-running member of the ruling Japan Sumo Association.

Succeeding his former boss, Musashihawa, he has invested his earnings and has opened his own eight-man Musashigawa stable as well as a restaurant in Tokyo.

Penitani and his wife, Masami, a former hula instructor, have a son, Joey, who will soon celebrate his first birthday.

It is a scene unimagined 26 years ago when he first arrived in Japan non-conversant in the language, unfamiliar with the customs and struggling to fathom the basics of Japan’s national sport.

“I was homesick when I first got to Japan, I couldn’t understand what they were saying and they didn’t understand what I was saying,” Penitani said. “But I knew I couldn’t go home until I accomplished something,” Penitani said. “It was like my father said: ‘This is your future. You’ve got to make something with it.’”

In a little more than two years he had climbed over more than 500 other sumotori to reach the sport’s highest division. There he achieved 49 consecutive winning tournaments at one point and was promoted to the most exalted rank of yokozuna, a position reached by only 66 others before him in sumo history.

“My father always pushed me to succeed, telling me, ‘When you make yokozuna I’m coming to see you (compete),’ ” Penitani said. “But he passed away before I made it (in 1999).”

When a chronic wrist ailment and other injuries forced his retirement in 2003 he was the last representative of Hawaii’s nearly 40-year presence in the sport.

Penitani worked as a coach for a while before deciding to open his own stable, making him only the second foreign-born stable master in sumo history. Maui’s Jesse Kuhaulua (Takamiyama) was the first.

“I’m just doing what I love to do, which is sumo,” Penitani said. “I can’t go home (to Hawaii) and make a living teaching sumo.” 

Between the six major tournaments, Penitani travels around Japan scouting for possible recruits for his stable. But in something of a departure from custom, he does not focus on just junior high, high school and college sumotori.

“I look for athletes — judo, rugby, baseball … I look beyond sumo,” Penitani said. 

By rule, stables are limited to one foreign aspirant at a time and Penitani has his nephew, Mamu.

“I look for their hunger and their heart,” Penitani said. “They don’t have to be big — that I can work on. They just have to be willing to work hard and dedicate themselves. Too many kids nowadays want everything to be on the table for free. That doesn’t happen in sumo.”

For that they need only look at the example standing before them.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.